Read The Gift of Illusion: A Thriller for Free Online Page A

a detective, he had never come across anything
even remotely as horrifying as this. The worst he had seen was a
man killed from multiple gunshot wounds in the chest, nothing in
comparison to this dread.
    “Honestly,” Simmons said, not letting his
eyes drift from the bed of ash. “Have you ever seen anything like
this before?”
    Isaac looked over. “Well." He paused to let
his mind wander off, searching through hell’s database. “No,” he
finally said, shaking his head. “Not like this.” He turned toward
the open window and looked outside at the house next door. “I
wonder,” he said, running his hand across the windowsill. “I wonder
if this window was open all night. And if not, when was it opened,
and who opened it?”
    “You think somebody could have come in
through the window?” Simmons asked.
    Isaac thought to himself, random, jumbled
thoughts that led nowhere, and finally said: “We need to talk to
the neighbors.”
    He turned from the window and leaned down
next to the bed. If he sneezed now the ashes would scatter all over
the room, and his face. He reached into his coat pocket and pulled
out a latex glove. Then he snapped the glove on his hand and
touched a small pile of the ash with his index finger. The black
ash collapsed smoothly from within and ran down the sides of the
hill. He picked up some of the ash and ran it through his
fingers.
    “The ash is really fine.”
    “Huh.”
    Isaac picked up another hand full and
repeated the process. “You see how easily it breaks apart.”
    Simmons nodded.
    “The particles are very fine and compact.
Not like your average fire where the ash tends to be clumpy.”
    “What does that mean?”
    Isaac stood up. “Just means this isn’t your
average fire. But I guess we already knew that, right?” He pressed
his hand against the wall next to the open window, a grimy soot
slide between his fingers. He removed a line of the grease with his
index finger. “Care to write your name in it?”
    The detectives circled the room looking
closely for anything else that looked unusual. They both turned
back to the bed, if by instinct.
    “I don’t see how a fire could burn so
steadily in one place for a long enough time to char through bones.
How could any fire do this kind of damage in such little time?”
    “You don’t believe it’s possible?” Simmons
asked.
    “With a little help, anything’s
possible.”
    “The parents?”
    “Maybe. But we won’t know until we talk to
them.”
    Isaac ran his hand across the top of the
dresser, and then searched the floor around it.
    “Wait a minute.”
    “What is it?”
    Isaac peered down the crack behind the
dresser, scanning the two-inch floor space separating the back of
the dresser from the wall. Nothing but a little ash lay there,
probably scattered by the wind from the open window. “Something’s
missing.”
    “What?”
    “I don’t know.” He pulled open each of the
four drawers and rummaged through them. “Can you do me a
favor?”
    “Sure.”
    “Go out to the car and bring me the photos.
I need to see something.”
    Simmons carefully butted through the mass of
media, ignoring any questions on his way to the car. He opened the
passenger door and snatched the manila folder lying on the back
seat.
    Upstairs, Isaac stood at the side of the
small bed, examined the fine gray ash below, and tried hard to
shake the intoxicating perfume from his senses.
    A small portion of the ash (not more than
two or three spoonfuls) was already in the hands of forensics for
analysis and would be placed under a number of tests, the most
effective test being Gas Chromatography, which could detect even
small amounts of accelerants present in the ash. First the sample
would be heated in a glass vial to vaporize any accelerants. A
special syringe is then used to extract a small sum of air from the
vial. The air is then injected into the gas chromatograph, and by
comparing that graph to the graph of known substances, such